Partisan‐Motivated Evaluations of Sexual Misconduct and the Mitigating Role of the #MeToo Movement

Abstract

When individuals evaluate something as serious as sexual misconduct allegations in politics, they are often motivated to defend their party-but outside forces can reduce these partisan biases. We bridge work from political psychology with studies of social movements to theorize how the #MeToo movement helps to mitigate partisan-motivated evaluations of sexual misconduct. With a two-wave survey experiment, we find that partisans are more likely to view out-party members as guilty of sexual misconduct and that individuals less likely to reflect are particularly biased in their evaluations. We then turn to the #MeToo movement and its potential to promote reflection. We show that support for #MeToo is associated with more evenhanded evaluations of sexual misconduct in politics, particularly among those unlikely to reflect on their own. This study contributes to our broader understanding of how movements can induce reflection and moderate partisan-motivated reasoning among the mass public.

Motivated to Forgive? Partisan Scandals and Party Supporters

“…Past research on political scandals has shown that voters are more forgiving of scandals involving politicians of their preferred party than those involving politicians from another party (Fischle, 2000; Klar & McCoy, 2021). Thus, we suspect that people's interpretation of the behavior (wearing blackface) was probably heavily motivated by their partisan predispositions.…”

Hegemonic Masculinity Predicts Support for U.S. Political Figures Accused of Sexual Assault

“…Partisanship has been the strongest predictor of reactions to politicians who have been accused of sexual misconduct. In fact, one’s political party identification is a stronger predictor of their attitudes toward sexual harassment than one’s sex (Hansen & Dolan, 2020), with people being more likely to defend a politician accused of sexual misconduct if he is a member of their own party (Klar & McCoy, 2021; Taber & Lodge, 2006). Furthermore, political conservatism is associated with stronger rape-supportive attitudes (Alter, 2017; Anderson et al, 1997; Barnett & Hilz, 2018; Graf, 2018), and Republican men are more accepting of sexual assault myths and are less likely to perceive sexual assault as a problem (Ortiz & Smith, 2021).…”

The Policy Blame Game: How Polarization Distorts Democratic Accountability across the Local, State, and Federal Level

“…In these cases, it is nearly impossible to evaluate politics evenhandedly. Existing work finds that partisan-motivated reasoning can determine how partisans interpret death statistics in the Iraq War (Gaines et al 2007), identify policy positions of the parties (Johnston, Steenbergen, and Lavine 2012), attribute guilt in the case of sexual misconduct (Klar and McCoy 2021), evaluate the economy (Lewis-Beck, Nadeau, and Elias 2008), and assess the risk and reality of global warming (Joslyn and Haider-Markel 2014).…”

“…Empirical work demonstrates how affective polarization can indeed predict partisan biases and, conversely, how those lower on the affective polarization scale appear to evaluate politics with greater objectivity. For example, higher affective polarization predicts behaviors that closely follow elite cues even when it comes to public health (Druckman et al 2021); those who are affectively polarized are more likely to bias their judgments regarding sexual misconduct in politics (Klar and McCoy 2021); affective polarization similarly predicts support for (or opposition to) democratic norms (Kingzette et al 2021). Over the past several decades, it appears that Americans overall have grown more affectively polarized (Iyengar et al 2019).…”